[Vision2020] American Institute of Physics: Physics of Radiative CO2 Forcing: Was: University of Idaho Argonaut, 1-25-11: Bret Zender: "Climate change is not to be ignored"

[Paul Rumelhart]

Ted Moffett wrote:
> It is interesting to compare your list of reasons to undermine the
> credibility of climate science, with the tactics employed by some
> critics to undermine the credibility of evolution science, as
> described at the bottom of this post, from the article "Forbes Rich
> List of Nonsense."  Your argument against the credibility of climate
> science is similar to the tactics of some creationists against
> evolution science.
>   

My "list to undermine the credibility of climate science" was intended 
as a list of reasons why we shouldn't assume it's as valid as gravity or 
even evolution. 

> The physicists at the American Institute of Physics likely have a
> better understanding of the modern physics of gravity than you or I.
> And their analysis of climate science, fundamentally dependent on
> physics, reveals an exhaustively studied scientific basis, both
> theoretically and empirically, for the radiative forcing of human CO2
> emissions being a significant driver of the current warming Earth
> climate.
>
> Read American Institute of Physics analysis of the physics of the
> radiative forcing of CO2 at website below:
>
> The Discovery of Global Warming                      January 2011
> Basic Radiation Calculations
>
> http://www.aip.org/history/climate/Radmath.htm
> -------------------------
> It is credible and well researched science on the issue of
> anthropogenic climate warming, such as is presented by the American
> Institute of Physics, and numerous other scientific organizations in
> many nations around the world, that supports the scientific consensus
> that human impacts on climate are significant and increasing in
> magnitude, as we continue CO2 emissions at a high rate, driving up
> atmospheric CO2 levels.
>   

That was in interesting and informative article.  They are making 
progress, although the article stopped the timeline in the 1980's 
because it started to get too complex for invertebrates like myself and 
they didn't want to harm me with too large a blast of raw knowledge.  At 
the end of the article, they were apparently going to make the switch 
from studying simple models to combining them into the famous GCMs.  
They didn't go into very much detail on exactly what measure they were 
using to determine if they were getting any closer to the answer.  
That's what it all comes down to.  What predictions do their models 
allow them to make, and how close do they come to observational data?  
They were still getting serious about the GCMs in the 1980s, and that 
was just three decades ago.   When climate needs by consensus at least 
30 years of averaged data to indicate a trend, they are still just 
getting started.

I'm still just arguing here, by the way, that climate science is a young 
science that shouldn't be taken as on par with basic physics like the 
law of gravity.  We still don't really know what the climate will do 
over the next few decades.  They have some guesses, and you can consider 
GCMs as basic hypotheses, but there hasn't been the time to see how they 
come out let alone refine them and test again.  Please don't take this 
as trying to "undermine climate science", they are doing great work and 
I'm interested in seeing how well their models prove out in the end.

> Your position, whether just for debate or offered in all sincerity, is
> advocating taking extreme risk based on a low probability of
> scientific error.  Consider the statement on the risks of global
> warming by Nobel Laurate economist Paul Krugman in an interview by
> Zakaria on CNN, with Krugman and Lomborg, Dec. 13, 2009:
>   

We can't base our entire civilization's future, economic or otherwise, 
on something that might happen.  What about other theories with just as 
dire consequences if they prove out?  Frankly, thought of an impending 
ice age scares me more than global warming does.  Cold is bad.  How many 
years without a true summer would it take to break our civilization apart?

For example, have you heard about the HAB theory?  It was a novel 
written by Allan Eckert based on his real research into the subject of 
cataclysmic pole shifts.  The basic theory is that, for some reason, the 
earth's crust suddenly spins on top of the mantle, leading to the North 
and South poles being located in different geographical locations.  The 
mantle and core of the earth keep spinning as they were, but since the 
crust moves the points where the axis of spin intersect the earth 
change.  This leads to horrible floods, earthquakes, volcanoes letting 
loose, and so forth.  Basically, we all die in the span of a few days.  
There are lots of interesting reasons why he believes this, and the book 
is a fascinating read.  One of the suggested mechanisms that may cause 
these cataclysmic polar shifts, though, is the buildup of ice at the 
poles.  If it's too irregular, the crust wobbles like an off-balance 
washing machine until it slips along the mantle and voila! the North 
Pole is now near Chicago.  So, given the cataclysmic nature of this 
event, shouldn't we try to be warming the earth up so that the ice at 
Antarctica (which has been steadily increasing for years) will melt and 
thus avert a polar shift that would kill almost everyone on earth?

As for doing something about global warming, why don't we concentrate 
for now on readying ourselves for the disasters that the theory supposes 
will occur?  Since that's every possible natural disaster I can think of 
(floods, drought, huge storms, etc) and since I also think that general 
preparedness is a good thing, I could go along with that idea.  It's 
certainly better than letting the richest among us make even more money 
in some kind of carbon trading scheme that resembles default credit 
swaps and other financial systems that have been plaguing us lately.

Preparing better for emergencies is simply a good idea.  That way, we 
won't have another Katrina, and fewer lives will be lost when natural 
disasters happen.  It will also buy us some time for the climate models 
to be tested in a truly scientific way and, if needed, refined based on 
how well they predict climate over the next few decades.

Paul

> Transcript in full at website below:
>
> http://archives.cnn.com/TRANSCRIPTS/0912/13/fzgps.01.html
>
> "You have to guard against the substantial possibility of really
> catastrophic change."
> -----------------------------
> Forbes’ rich list of nonsense
>
> Filed under: Climate Science Reporting on climate— group @ 6 January 2011
> Guest commentary from Michael Tobis and Scott Mandia with input from
> Gavin Schmidt, Michael Mann, and Kevin Trenberth
>
> http://www.realclimate.org/index.php/archives/2011/01/forbes-rich-list-of-nonsense/#more-5984
>
> Quote below from website article above:
>
> "Bell uses the key technique that denialists use in debates, dubbed by
> Eugenie Scott the “Gish gallop”, named after a master of the style,
> anti-evolutionist Duane Gish. The Gish gallop raises a barrage of
> obscure and marginal facts and fabrications that appear at first
> glance to cast doubt on the entire edifice under attack, but which on
> closer examination do no such thing. In real-time debates the number
> of particularities raised is sure to catch the opponent off guard;
> this is why challenges to such debates are often raised by enemies of
> science. Little or no knowledge of a holistic view of any given
> science is needed to construct such scattershot attacks."
> --------------------------------------------
> Vision2020 Post: Ted Moffett
>
> On 2/4/11, Paul Rumelhart <godshatter at yahoo.com> wrote:
>   
>> His terms are a little imprecise, but anthropogenic global warming is
>> not anywhere near as established as gravity or evolution.  It's a
>> science where we have 150 years of somewhat reliable data in a field
>> where you have to have 30+ years of data just to be able to say anything
>> at all about climate.  Is it warming, on average, right now?  Yes.  Do
>> we know how much of it is due to man's carbon footprint?  I would say
>> no.   The ice cores show that temperature has gone up and down over the
>> last few thousand years.  We're recovering from the little ice age.  I
>> wouldn't place any bets on global warming or global cooling right now.
>> Why?  Because we don't know why the temperature has risen in the past.
>> We suspect the Sun is involved, but we can't really say.
>>
>> I will say that the Global Climate Change Media Machine is being
>> successful in getting across their narratives.  They've turned a new,
>> more-or-less untested science into a science that people believe is as
>> solid as the law of gravity.  This is despite their earlier efforts to
>> try to make people believe that there was little variation until evil
>> man came around and screwed it all up, what I like to call the Hockey
>> Stick Era.  Despite their resistance to criticism, including (if the
>> Climate Gate emails are to be believed) conspiring to get around FOIA
>> laws, they eventually had to concede that their famous graph had
>> statistical problems.
>>
>> For this and other reasons, I'll still be skeptical about climate
>> forecasts more than three days ahead.  I will continue to avoid stepping
>> off of high places, though.
>>
>> Paul
>>
>> Ted Moffett wrote:
>>     
>>> Other journalistic offerings from the Argonaut on the problem of
>>> anthropogenic climate warming have been rather lacking, but I thought
>>> this article covered some important points concisely, while being
>>> entertaining.
>>>
>>> Given gravity is just a theory, for fair and open minded debate and
>>> education in the public schools, physics classes should present the
>>> theory of levitation, don't you think?  This makes as much sense as
>>> insisting creationism be taught in physics classes.... After all,
>>> evolutionary biologists might be just as fraudulent and or incompetent
>>> as some insist climate scientists are, ditto for physicists and their
>>> "theory of gravity."  Just a theory, remember!
>>>
>>> http://www.uiargonaut.com/sections/opinion/stories/2011/jan/12511/climate_change_is.html
>>>
>>> Climate change is not to be ignored
>>> Bret Zender | Argonaut
>>>
>>> I get this weird aura sometimes. It's that sort of
>>> "Alice-in-Wonderland"-like sense of being in a place where reality
>>> isn't at all what you know, love and thought it was. It's like reality
>>> came home violently drunk and slapped you around and said it was
>>> cheating on you. Then it swiftly apologizes and says it's sorry and it
>>> should never have done that and didn't mean any of it, but things are
>>> never quite the same again.
>>>
>>> I felt that aura while reading a news story at ClimateScienceWatch.org
>>> about the newly elected Republican House majority disbanding Nancy
>>> Pelosi's Select Committee on Energy Independence and Global Warming.
>>> That's right — disbanding. Why are they doing this?
>>>
>>> In the words of Rep. James Sensenbrenner (R-Wisconsin), the climate
>>> scientists might have been the perpetrators of a "massive
>>> international scientific fraud." In James Sensenbrenner's mind,
>>> science is an organization — a competing organization like any other,
>>> driven by its own profit.
>>>
>>> In other words, it's something they have a reason to commit fraud for
>>> — as though scientists will finally get to show numbers in the black
>>> this quarter. Some say you can only perceive the world as it appears
>>> through your own eyes, and it's hard to find a better example of that
>>> than James Sensenbrenner.
>>>
>>> Disproving global warming at this point is like trying to disprove
>>> evolution or gravity. It's not about disproving Darwin — it would be
>>> like uncovering the Illuminati, Bigfoot, King Arthur and the hidden
>>> alien knowledge Egyptians used to build the pyramids at once.
>>>
>>> That's how big of a conspiracy this would require within the
>>> scientific community. It would be a conspiracy within NASA, the
>>> National Organization for Science, the Pew Center, and 99 percent of
>>> the scientific community. So many people have tested the evidence and
>>> theories out there that you can barely find a single reputable
>>> scientific organization that contests it.
>>>
>>> And yet, another glance down the page reveals this other gem of a news
>>> story: "Sarah Palin Supports Teaching Creationism in Schools." Great.
>>> She declines to say what she believes is truth but the controversy
>>> should be taught in schools, slipping back to the core argument that
>>> "debate is always healthy." This is the 2008 Republican nominee for
>>> vice president. This is the woman who was a heartbeat away from
>>> becoming the leader of the free world.
>>>
>>> Do we teach the controversy to gravity? Do we allow the view that
>>> Yggdrasil drags the planet along by its tentacles a fair shake right
>>> up there with Einstein? Do we let Holocaust deniers present their side
>>> of the Anne Frank story?
>>>
>>> No. Schools teach the truth. They teach science.
>>> ------------------------------------------
>>> Vision2020 Post: Ted Moffett
>>>
>>>
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>>     
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